The present invention relates to the field of information technology and more particularly, systems and techniques that relate to deploying a software application in a network environment.
Enterprise application software may be software used by an organization, such as a business, to perform one or more functions or operations associated with the organization. For example, a business may use enterprise application software, such as Documentum® provided by EMU), to organize or manage content associated with the business's operations. Services provided by enterprise application software may be on-demand or online tools such as online payment processing, an interactive product catalogue, automated billing systems, security, enterprise content management, internet technology (IT) service management, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, business intelligence, project management, collaboration, human resource management, manufacturing, enterprise application integration, and enterprise forms automation.
Enterprise application software may be hosted by host applications which may be implemented on one or more servers or other network resources. Thus, an enterprise application may be deployed to multiple host applications which may each be used to execute an instance of the enterprise application and provide services associated with the enterprise application. The host applications may each be implemented or associated with a node in a communications network, such as the Internet. Thus, a host application may be associated with and represented as a network node in a communications network. A node may be a physical network node, such as a host computer, which may be identified by an Internet protocol (IP) address.
Nodes may belong to a cluster, which may consist of a set of loosely connected computers that work together and may be viewed as a single system or computational entity. Thus, a cluster of nodes may be identified by a single virtual IP address. A cluster of nodes may include a load balancer (LBR), which may be a server configured to manage computational loads placed on each node in the cluster, and manage the transition of functionality from one node to another in the event of failure of a node. Because clusters of resources often share computational workloads, nodes within the cluster often utilize the same versions of software, such as an enterprise application.
Conventional methods remain limited because they do not provide an efficacious way to deploy application software, such as an enterprise application, to a cluster of nodes.